It must have been the Christmas of 1993. We were out for a family walk in a stretch of woodland just outside Lilongwe (in Malaŵi, one of Africa’s poorest countries). My two-year-old son, Jacques—tired out from digging up ants and fighting with his big brother, Enrique—was on my shoulders, and I was trying to bring a little festive jollity to the traipse home by singing Good King Wenceslas. Badly, for I can barely hold a tune, my main musical training having been a boyhood squeaking out hymns in stone pillared village churches of little England alongside my equally tin-eared mum. More melodic genes have somehow surfaced in my progeny, as Jacques now demonstrated by whacking me around the head with the stick he had refused to relinquish upon ascent to the paternal loft. “Stop! Stop it, Daddy!” He couldn’t bear the noise.
Six years later he got his come-uppance. By then, life had taken us to the city of Kunming, the capital of southwest China’s Yunnan Province. For a couple of years Jacques had been learning the violin there with an American teacher. He progressed rapidly and con brio under her firm but encouraging tuition, until she had a crisis of some kind and decided she couldn’t continue. She suggested as a substitute a veteran professor she knew in the Yunnan Academy of Music: a big cheese, the top strings man, indeed, in this province of 45 million people. We went along to his apartment in the dismal academy compound and Jacques romped through his pieces with his usual zest. In daily life he was prone to breaking things, crashing his bike, pinching fingers in drawers, but when he picked up the violin those fingers became remarkably deft. The distinguished professor, who sat impassive throughout the performance, then delivered his verdict. “Well,” he said, “As I expected, he’s going to have to start again from scratch.” It was both brutal and casual, like snapping a twig.
Remote. Marginalised. Left behind. In Kenya, these journalistic and development clichés apply not just to one or two neglected backwaters but to vast expanses of arid and semi-arid land that make up fully 80 percent of the national territory. In those areas, now highly vulnerable to climate change, relatively sparse populations of pastoralists continue to raise cattle, donkeys, goats and camel on their ancestral land, but they have lived at the margins of national development since Kenya’s independence in 1966.
In 1989, as communism was collapsing across Eastern Europe, Francis Fukuyama achieved intellectual celebrity—and notoriety—with a short essay, The End of History? “We may be witnessing,” he wrote, “the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” A quarter of a century later, he has not quite recanted.
At the outbreak of Algeria’s war for independence in 1952, there were one million French settlers living in that country alone. Today, an estimated 250,000 people of Lebanese descent live in West Africa. Some two million people of Indian descent live in East and Southern Africa (not counting a million or so more on the islands of Mauritius and Réunion.) Numbers like these are worth bearing in mind when approaching Howard French’s book of anecdotal reportage, China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants are Building a New Empire in Africa. (Knopf, New York, 2014)
A prizewinning novel explores France’s identity crisis with lyrical panache—and a painful look back at the not-so-glorious past. But hang on a minute. A weird undertow appears to suggest that the answer to present troubles lies in more, er, sexual congress.Vraiment? I thought it was more a matter of politics.
Captain Phillips (Directed by Paul Greengrass, 2013)
The most interesting question about this morality tale of American power efficiently eliminating vermin is whether it should be seen merely as a feel-good pot boiler or whether its uncompromising resistance to depth betrays a wider anxiety about the way the world is going.
Rwandans living or travelling in the West must, I imagine, hate encountering the casual question, “So where are you from?” The answer will surely evoke either polite confusion or else impertinent enquiry. Were you (or your parents) among the killers or the victims, the interlocutor is too likely to wonder, so notorious is the Rwanda genocide brand. And are you a Tutti or a Frutti, or whatever they’re called? If I were Rwandan I would definitely make a habit of claiming to originate from Burundi—a place so few people outside of Africa have heard of that you could be fairly sure of keeping the conversation on an innocuous keel.
Having this year happened to become a temporary resident of Rwanda, I felt the need to situate myself with a bit of reading. And it’s impossible to get away from the genocide as the defining publishing event. So here’s my response to five of the most readily available texts—one ‘novel,’ one memoir, one work of ‘reportage’, one of journalistic analysis, one of scholarship. I review these in the order I read them. Four were written by white North American men, so there was a clear risk that they might say more about North American men, and their way of seeing, than about Rwanda. That’s certainly the case with the first, which disturbed me most but taught me least.
This piece was published in The East African in April, 2012, at a time when I busy getting Oil in Uganda up and running. That project occupied me for a year, but it is doing okay by itself now so am I free to think about other things.
The announcement last week of a promising oil discovery in Kenya, combined with news that Tanzania’s offshore gas fields are proving even richer than at first thought, raises the prospect of an East African region transformed by hydrocarbon wealth.
I offered this piece to The East African in early 2012. I wasn’t surprised that they turned it down. No-one likes to hear that equal rights have a price tag.
It was recently my privilege to do some consultancy work for SENSE International. This UK-based NGO is working in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda with children and young people who are both deaf and blind.
This piece was published in The East African (Nairobi) February 6-11 2012. (Web version, missing a by-line, here.)
China’s gift to the African Union of a US$200 million headquarters in Addis Ababa symbolises not only the Asian giant’s increased engagement with Africa, but also the nature of that engagement.
Whilst the West has—since the end of the Cold War, at least—ostensibly striven to promote ‘sound macroeconomic management’ and ‘good governance,’ China’s style has simply been to do business with whoever is in power. Air-conditioned debating chambers for ruling elites are a logical sweetener.
